How I suffered for art's sake

When she was asked to be a Turner Prize judge, Lynn Barber was thrilled. A year later, that has changed. On the eve of the 2006 show she reflects on how months of seeing banal and derivative work have left her depressed about the state of contemporary art in Britain

It makes me sad to remember how thrilled I was on 15 April 2005, the day I received a letter from Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, asking me to serve as a juror for the 2006 Turner Prize. I had to read it a dozen times before I could believe it and then I was so pathetically proud I told everyone I knew, even the windowcleaner. Most of my friends laughed their heads off but none of them actually said: 'Don't do it.' Even Tracey Emin, when she finished laughing, said: 'Yeah, do it', before adding firmly: 'But don't nominate me.' (She was nominated for My Bed in 1999 and lost.)

The letter said that if I had any questions, I should meet Deuchar to discuss them. I had one huge question - why me? - but I didn't like to voice it and, therefore, to this day don't know the answer. My qualifications for being a Turner Prize judge are... er... um. I have interviewed a lot of artists, usually sympathetically, though the Chapman Brothers say they will kill me if they ever see me again. Some artists I interviewed, such as Emin and Sarah Lucas, have become friends. I go to art shows regularly and I am - or, perhaps, that should be was - generally enthusiastic about contemporary art.

It always infuriates me when people claim to be art lovers just because they go to every Monet, Constable, Caravaggio exhibition and then make crappy jokes about unmade beds and pickled sharks. And, unlike most people in the art world, I do warmly approve of the Turner Prize, the whole vulgar, crowd-pulling, bookie-pleasing razzmatazz of it.

Still, this does not add up to much of a CV. I suppose the unflattering truth is that it is quite difficult to find independent jurors (and they always try to have one) who are not professionally or commercially involved in the art world. My colleague Miranda Sawyer is doing it next time; I tried to warn her off, but she was all excited just like I was at the beginning, poor possum.

A month after the letter, Deuchar summoned me and my fellow jurors to Tate Britain to meet the curatorial team that organises the prize. One of the jurors, Matthew Higgs, who runs the White Columns gallery in New York, didn't appear because of visa problems, but the other two were Margot Heller, who runs the South London Gallery, and Andrew Renton, who teaches curating at Goldsmiths College.

Deuchar explained that our job was to go round shows for a year and choose the ones we wanted to nominate (he suggested we should each choose six), then meet again in May 2006 to hammer out the shortlist of four. The chosen artists would then have a few months to prepare their individual shows for the Tate and we would finally meet again in December 2006 to choose the winner.

It sounds simple but actually the rules are quite weird. The artists have to be under 50 and born in or living and working in Britain. The age cut-off is sensible enough, but how long do artists have to live here to qualify? Could they commute? And - this is the bit the public never understands - the artists have to be nominated for a particular show, not a body of work.

Moreover, the shows the jurors nominate are not the same shows the public sees at the Tate. The four shortlisted artists have to cobble together a new show (rather quickly) for the Tate, and some produce a good show and some don't. This is not supposed to influence the judges but it would be odd if it didn't. Many insiders believe that the reason the Chapman Brothers lost to Grayson Perry in 2003 was because their Tate show was disappointing. On the other hand, the public inevitably only judge the artists by the shows they put on at the Tate and are rightly baffled when, say, Martin Creed's light bulb walks away with the prize.

At the end of the meeting, Deuchar showed us a list of eligible shows that had been given to the previous year's jurors and promised that we would get a similar list in a few weeks' time. (In fact it didn't turn up till January.) I almost fainted when I saw it - it listed shows in Sydney, Sao Paolo, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Toronto, New York - and all this on an expenses budget of £250. 'I don't like flying,' I whimpered. 'You do Milton Keynes and I'll do Sao Paolo,' said Andrew Renton and I gratefully agreed.

Next day, I went to see Sadie Coles, a friend who runs a gallery in Heddon Street, London W1, who duly laughed her head off, then said: 'You'll need this.' She handed me a newsletter listing all the current contemporary art shows in Great Britain and Ireland. There were 198 in London alone! I had no idea. Moreover, many of them were in parts of London - east of Hackney, south of Peckham - I had never penetrated. That first weekend, I thought I'd 'do' the Bethnal Green-Shoreditch area, which has the highest concentration of galleries in Britain, but I only managed to see about a dozen.

Many of them were shut; a lot were simply unfindable, even with a map. (It is part of the mystique of 'edgy' galleries to hide in warehouses and lock-ups with no visible means of ingress.) Vyner Street in Hackney is supposed to contain a dozen galleries but even after a year I only found six. On the other hand, I did once see Keanu Reeves in Vyner Street admiring an artwork in the Modern Art gallery, a blue, plastic rectangle, I seem to recall, that looked like a Formica offcut and cost 20 grand. Reeves described it as 'almost Kleinian', which is artspeak for blue.

Seeing Keanu was about the only consolation for my long, lonely treks to the East End. At first, my friends were keen to accompany me, but they all tried it once and never again. The general reaction was incredulity that we'd driven through traffic jams for two hours in order to see a show consisting of three slabs of concrete and a tyre. 'Is this all?' was the usual plaint. Or we'd be told that the video/DVD/sound installation/whatever was under repair but should be working again next week. Galleries are incredibly resistant to the idea that they might in any sense welcome the public.

If you are important, or if you just think you're important, you ring the gallery beforehand to fix an appointment. If you wander in off the street, you are generally assumed to be a nutter and maybe you are. But then if you make an appointment, you have to be 'talked through' the exhibition by one of the galleristas, which is usually a pain, especially if you are looking at three slabs of concrete and a tyre. (There are some exceptions - I always enjoyed being 'talked through' shows by Tot Taylor of Riflemaker's.)

For the firstfew months, I conscientiously tried to visit every London gallery listed in the New Exhibitions newsletter, but I soon learned that there are an awful lot of galleries that subsist by selling anaemic abstracts intended to go nicely with the curtains. Once, I was invited to the opening of an 'exhibition' in the Trafalgar Hotel which was a corridor next to the lifts with half-a-dozen photographs of flowers. Also, I wasted a lot of time going to shows by artists with English-sounding names who turned out to be either Canadian (Canadians are big at present) or American, while simultaneously missing shows by artists I thought sounded foreign.

It took me some heavy Googling to learn that Haluk Akakce, Zarina Bhimji, Ergin Cavusoglu, Kerstin Kartscher, Goshka Macuga, Saskia Olde Wolbers and Zineb Sedira are all British artists. I could have saved all this wasted time if I had got someone like Sadie Coles to mark my card, but I was keen on the idea that I was a fresh eye, untainted by art-world opinions, and that I would discover everything for myself. What a clot.

I also felt a mission to find a painter to nominate. I don't believe that painting is intrinsically 'better' than video or any other kind of art, but I know the majority of people think it is and I don't see why their wishes should be ignored, especially when the prize commemorates Turner. But the more paintings I saw, the more I came to feel it was a lost cause.

There is (or was; maybe it has gone by now?) a curious fashion for postage-stamp oils with vaguely Old Master references, or large, luridly coloured acrylics with vaguely Old Master references. Either way, they seem designed to draw attention to their inadequacy. Luckily, we did find one good painter, Tomma Abts, to go on the shortlist, but she is a rarity.

The effect of looking at an awful lot of art in a short space of time, and with an increasingly bad temper, as I did, is that your judgment goes haywire. So much passes in a blur that if you find anything at all different or memorable, you are prepared to hail it as the next Picasso. I remember coming home from the Baltic in Newcastle and telling my daughter: 'I saw some exciting sculpture made of carpet fluff!' She stared at me. 'What was exciting about it?' 'Well, it was a room with a fitted carpet,' I blathered, 'and the artist had scraped some of the carpet fluff into little piles to look like things.'

I showed her the catalogue entry: 'Tonica Lemos Auad, Brazilian artist born 1968, working in London. Auad's carpet installations begin by the artist's delicate gathering and repositioning of minute strands of fluff, teased patiently from newly laid carpet... Auad sees these works as three-dimensional, site-specific drawings that create a space in which the viewer can enter and engage with the settings.' My daughter sniggered: 'So could you engage by hoovering it up?' Some people are such philistines.

Meanwhile, the dizzy social circus that is the art world whirled on and on. Once your name is on lots of gallery mailing lists, it is possible to get drunk as a skunk at art parties every night of the week. And as word spread that I was a Turner juror, I found myself invited to more and more art dinners, which is where the VIPs go while the liggers are finishing off the free beer and vodka.

Art dinners are odd affairs, usually held in private rooms of fashionable restaurants, for 30 or 40 people. It is never clear who is paying (though somebody is) or why you are there. Nobody is ever properly introduced, so you spend half the evening trying to work out who everyone is. I probably insulted people left and right by asking if they ran a gallery when they were, say, head of Italy's national museums, but how are you supposed to know that stuff when nobody tells you?

In December, halfway through my jurorship, I was invited to the dinner for the 2005 Turner Prize. It was an oddly tense evening, partly because the Tate was under attack for buying Chris Ofili's The Upper Room, and Nick Serota made an impassioned speech defending it, which rather overshadowed the prizegiving. I had confidently told all my friends that Jim Lambie was bound to win because he was by far the best; I almost fainted when the winner was announced as Simon Starling, the man who turned a shed into a boat into a shed. When I asked my fellow juror Andrew Renton why Starling had won, he said: 'Because he was by far the best.'

That night, I wrote in my diary: 'For the first time, I find myself seriously wondering - is it all a fix? I loathe the idea that even by posing the question I am giving sustenance to the Brian Sewell contemporary-art-is-all-a-con-trick school of thought, but I do find it strange that I am halfway through my year as a juror and absolutely no nearer understanding what I am meant to be doing. As a journalist, I am used to being thrown into situations where everyone else is an expert and I am an idiot. I've covered everything from pony-club gymkhanas to round-the-world yacht races on that basis and usually manage to make some sense of them. But after six months in the art world, I feel as adrift as on the day I started, thoroughly demoralised, disillusioned, and full of dark fears that I have been stitched up - that actually the 'art world' [whatever that is] has already decided who will win the 2006 Turner Prize and that I am brought in purely as a figleaf. That would explain why they chose someone so ignorant!'

In the New Year, things seemed to improve. I got more ruthless about which shows to go to; I badgered Margot Heller, my fellow juror, for guidance and I finally got the list of eligible shows out of the Tate curator, though most of them had been and gone. I found a few artists I really liked and others, in the British Art Show, whose work I wanted to see more of. My mood of total hopelessness lifted and I began to think it possible to find six artists to nominate by May.

Then there was a new complication: someone applied under the Freedom of Information Act to read all correspondence, including emails, between Turner jurors and the Tate, so that my wails of anguish about missing shows and not being kept informed were then published in the Sunday Telegraph. After that, I didn't dare correspond with anyone.

Incidentally, the public is always invited to send in nominations for the Turner Prize. People can send them as much as they like but they might as well drop them straight in the bin. I kept asking when we could see the public nominations, thinking that if any looked interesting I would follow them up. I was given a bald list of names just a fortnight before we had to choose the shortlist, so if there had been any shows I needed to see, they would have been long gone. Only one artist, Ube, polled more than 100 votes and I wasted some hours looking for him on the internet, until my daughter informed me that Ube meant Unsolicited Bulk Email. It is wrong of the Tate to suggest that the public's views will be taken into account when they are not.

I was also making the big mistake, I now realise, of sticking to the Turner rules. I thought, because I'd been told, that the artists had to be nominated for a particular show, which meant, I would have thought, that one had to have seen the show. Only when we met to draw up the shortlist did I realise that none of the judges had seen all the shows, and that my fears about having to fly to Sao Paolo were groundless. One of the judges said you could often see the shows better online. Why didn't I think of that?

The shortlist meeting was held in May, chaired by Nick Serota. Several people had told me I really shouldn't worry my little head because by some mysterious wizardry Serota would choose the shortlist himself. However, this wasn't what happened at the meeting; he barely intervened.

In theory, we could have started with a longlist of 24 but there was a lot of overlapping between the other jurors - though not with me! There was one artist we all nominated but apart from that, all my names were brutally rejected. I made the mistake of saying one of them was a 'beautiful colourist' and realised as soon as I said it that I had just shot her fox. I was prepared to have a big argument about Tino Sehgal, who I knew one of the other jurors fancied. Sehgal specialises in 'interventions', such as the woman who suddenly burst into song at the Tate Triennial and is technically eligible because he happens to have been born in Britain. However, he represented Germany in the last Venice Biennale which seemed to me to make him definitively German, and I was prepared to fight this to the death. But actually, I didn't have to; one of the other judges remarked that he was 'very fashionable' and that was the end of him.

Once my nominees had been tossed aside, there was a fairly straightforward consensus and we quickly arrived at a shortlist. Everyone seemed to agree it was a good list or, at least, a nicely varied one, including, as it does, a sculptor (Rebecca Warren), a painter (Tomma Abts), a photographer/film-maker (Phil Collins) and an all-rounder (Mark Titchner). Their shows will be unveiled to the public on Tuesday. My duties as a juror are over, except that we all have to meet again in December to choose the winner. I would have thought the winner was blindingly obvious, but then I thought that last year with Jim Lambie.

I hate to say it, but my year as a Turner juror has seriously dampened, though I hope not extinguished, my enthusiasm for contemporary art. There is so much bad work around, so much that is derivative, half-baked or banal, you can't believe that galleries would show it. I think what happened is that the huge success of the YBAs in the Nineties has created a peculiar post-boom glut whereby there are now more galleries looking for young artists than worthwhile artists to fill them.

The four artists we eventually chose for the shortlist are obviously exceptional - they are all producing interesting work and one of them, I believe, is outstanding. But what do I know? I feel as naive about art as the day I started.

The Turner Prize show runs at Tate Britain from Tuesday. The winner will be announced on 4 December

The 2006 shortlist

The video installation: Phil Collins

Born 1970 in Runcorn, Collins lived and worked in Belfast before moving to Belgrade and now Glasgow. His work consists of participatory video installation and photographs, often taken in areas of political conflict. They Shoot Horses (2004), currently at Tate Britain, is his best-known work - two seven-hour videos of the artist and nine Palestinians in a dance marathon. He also filmed Iraqis sitting silently for screen tests for a non-existent Hollywood movie in 2002. His work has been shown at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.

He says 'I watch hours of reality TV a day and would love to see a TV show for people whose lives have been ruined by appearing on reality TV.'

Born 1967 in Kiel, Germany, Abts has lived in London since 1995. Her work consists of small abstract oil and acrylic paintings that Abts insists must be no bigger than 48x38cm (19x15in). She has exhibited at the Wrong Gallery in New York, the Kunsthalle in Basel and London's Greengrassi. Abts does not paint at an easel or with her work hanging on a wall, but with the canvas laid flat on a worktop. Building up layers of paint until they take form, the painter insists she has no preconceptions before she starts work and picks titles for the paintings from a dictionary of German first names.

Born 1965 in London, Warren studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College and Chelsea College of Art and then did a residency at Ruskin School, Oxford. Though untrained in pottery and sculpture, she makes sculptural installations, most recently figures of women in unfired clay, and has been shown at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Cologne and the Tate Triennial in London.

She says 'The figures are quite inept, but in a good way. I think too much training would be a bit of a curse. I want them to look like they'd been made by a sort of pervy, middle-aged provincial art teacher.'

Critics say 'I love Rebecca Warren's high-spirited sculptures made of modelling clay. She's like a sculptural cartoonist, creating messy and vigorous parodies of Rodin and Giacometti, with a dash of Robert Crumb thrown in.' Richard Dorment

Odds: 2/1

The all-rounder: Mark Titchner

Born 1973 in Luton, Titchner trained at Central Saint Martins and lives and works in London. He has exhibited at the Arnolfini in Bristol, Tate Britain and Vilma Gold in London. His work includes paintings, light boxes, animations, sculptures and a book Why and Why Not, published in 2004. Titchner explores beliefs and ideologies by quoting advertising campaigns, religious texts, song lyrics and literature, with statements such as If You Can Dream it You Must Do it and Everything Beautiful is Far Away

He says 'I'm interested in personal will and belief, the struggles of trying to be a good person.'

Critics say 'You can take in one of Titchner's works in seconds, but it stays in the mind, niggling and irritating and changing the way you look at the world... He is a true original, a genuinely strange character - and one of the most exciting young artists in Britain today.' Richard Dorment